Today’s Travel Magazine of the NY Times (registration required) has a nice piece on Guanajuato, the best touristic spot near the city where I was born and raised, Leon (which sadly only gets two pages in my 1,000-page copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Mexico).
Guanajuato, a labyrinthine colonial city as old as it gets in Mexico, is a great place to visit all year-round. During October, in particular, it hosts its yearly “Festival Internacional Cervantino”. The shows are amazing, though I have to warn that the city gets impossibly crowded and noisy. The rest of the year the city is kinder to peace-loving visitors.